Letters to A Young Writer

From the bestselling author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin comes a lesson in how to be a writer—and so much more than that. Intriguing and inspirational, this book is a call to look outward rather than inward. McCann asks his readers to constantly push the boundaries of experience, to…

“That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.” ― Edna O’Brien Young writer, has the passion of our calling been robbed from us? It often seems that the crisis of our age is that we are living in stunned submission to…

You should be exhausted when you finish your story. You should feel as if you have just ripped yourself open and that there is nothing more to give. Doubt yourself. Be convinced that you are a charlatan. Anything good you wrote was entirely accidental. Be sure that you will never be able to do it…

Let’s file this one under The Anxiety of Influence. What happens if I discover that someone is writing the same thing as me? What happens if I accidentally echo a line? What happens if I get thrown in the wrong direction? What happens if I over-reach? What happens if I fall out of a tree…

Writers write just about everywhere. In ships. On trains. In libraries. On the subway. In the cafe. In writer’s getaways. On top of fridges. In plush offices. In jail cells. In the heart of hollowed-out trees. There’s a good deal of shite talked about writers in their garrets (mea culpa, I sometimes work in a…

To be a hero, you have to be willing to play the fool. You should speak the truth, even when – or maybe especially when – it’s unpopular. The proper fool speaks against war and greed and shallow ignorance. He shoots his mouth off. But he shoots it off in the right direction. …

It is your job as a writer to tell the world something it does not already know. This is easily said, but so difficult to do. Seek out those truths that are not self-evident. The more freedom a writer has the more she must become a critic of the place she lives. Depth begins at…

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” ― Virginia Woolf When we write novels we often have no idea where we are going. We’re operating on the fumes of the language and the sudden feeling that what we are doing has texture and depth. A writer suddenly…

Why do we tell stories? Why do we have a deep need to tell one another that which is real and invented? Why do we need to lean across the table, or the fireside, or the fabulously intertwined wires of the Internet, and whisper “Listen”? We tell stories because we’re somewhat sick of reality and…

At certain points in history it is only the poetic that is capable of dealing with brute reality. The writer arrives at the conjunction of these two forces — reality and fiction — and makes a decision about how to proceed. There she stands, on the edge of two tectonic plates. What she has to…

Maybe the best way to gauge the true importance of what you’re doing is The Bus Theory. You wake up in the morning. You get to your workspace. You carve. You chop. You create. And at the end of the workday – be it an hour, or a morning, or the whole livelong day –…

A lot of the time when we talk about writing – and in particular fiction – we talk about the complicated confluence of truth, reality, history, facts and lies. But what is a lie? And how is it shaped? And do we lie in order to tell the proper truth? Let’s talk about the word…

Video Trailer for Apeirogon

This is the first in a series of short videos where Colum McCann talks about his new novel, Apeirogon. “A work of incredible magnitude . . . McCann finds the emotional accuracy, the sensitivity, and the beauty to tell the heartbreaking reality of life in Israel-Palestine, while allowing readers a glimmer of necessary hope. Apeirogon is greater…

Welcome to the Newsletter

The good folks at Random House asked me to do an occasional newsletter in the run-up to my new novel, APEIROGON (coming Feb 25, 2020), a glimpse behind the curtain, a step behind the pages, to give a little glance into my world.

Praise for Apeirogon

“Every significant novel is an act of reckless originality. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is nothing like any book you’ve ever read. Think of reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, or George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo for the first time. Think of discovering an entirely unprecedented, and profoundly true, narrative form. Think about feeling that the very idea of the novel, of what it can be and what it’s capable of containing, has been expanded, forever.”—Michael Cunningham, New York Times bestselling author of The Snow Queen

Apeirogon Tour

Apeirogon goes on sale on Feb 25th and tour dates in February and March will include New York, Boston, Portland Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Mississippi, Ann Arbor Michigan, San Diego, Montclaire New Jersey and more! Also Ireland and England, followed by Australia in May!! Also Edinburgh in August!

Patriots of Elsewhere

The following speech was written and delivered by Colum McCann on the occasion of the PEN/Song Lyrics Award in Boston in September 2016, given to Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits.

TODAY is a day when literature salutes song and its writers. So, come song: lend me eloquence…

Punched and knocked unconscious after trying to help a woman who had also been assaulted along a busy city street.

National Book Award Interview

Interview conducted by Bret Anthony Johnston. Bret Anthony Johnston: First, congratulations on Let the Great World Spin being named a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction! Do you recall the inception of the book? Was there any image or incident or memory that triggered the writing process? Colum McCann: Thanks so much. One only has to…

Colum McCann talks about winning the National Book Award (IrishCentral)

Colum McCann talks about winning the National Book Award

WTC Provides Back Story For Colum McCann’s ‘Spin’

“What I was most interested in was not so much Philip Petit but the people who were on the ground, the people who walk the sort-of little tightrope of our ordinary everyday moments,” McCann says. The reactions of McCann’s main characters to the stunt range from gripping fear that the tight-rope walker will fall, to…

“McCann joins ranks of the great” (Irish Times)

For Colum McCann, the Dublin-born, New York-based writer whose ‘ Let the Great World Spin’ won the US National Book Award on Wednesday night, the prestigious accolade helped make up for Ireland’s defeat to France – just about, he tells FIONA McCANN